Airy Fairy Tale

With Leonardo da Vinci as the fairy godmother and Drew Barrymore as a feisty tomboy who initially spurns the prince as arrogant, out of touch with his people and anything but charming, the latest remake of the Cinderella story forces the lovers to earn their glass slippers.

In this revisionist version, the stepsisters are beautiful, not ugly--even though Megan Dodds as Marguerite, the prettier of the pair, possesses an inner child of incomparable nastiness. Setting the fairy tale further on its head, the Cinderella character Danielle rescues the prince as much as he rescues her, first hauling him on her back to escape a band of gypsy robbers, then saving the spineless wonder from a loveless, arranged marriage. And there’s not a pumpkin in sight.

“You are the only magic here,” Leonardo encourages the self-reliant Danielle as she sets forth to win her prince.

Says director Andy Tennant: “I’ve always hated the Cinderella fairy tale for two reasons: Guys have to live up to being Prince Charming and women are raised to believe the only way they can be happy is to marry a great-looking guy with a big house. I don’t want my daughters growing up to buy that. Our version says Cinderella’s magic comes from within, not from some little old lady with a wand.”

In a calculated attempt to appeal to boys as well as girls, Tennant and screenwriter Rick Parks have injected a few sword fights and “the guys’ point of view,” as well as tonic doses of much-needed humor, never the original story’s strong point.

As the evil stepmother Baroness Rodmilla of Ghent, Anjelica Huston milks her lines for all the wicked, campy irony they will bear. Alighting from her carriage, she drinks in the less-than-magnificent prospect of her new husband’s dilapidated manor home. “It’s charming,” she lies, rolling her eyes wide as if appealing for divine intervention. “Where is the main house?”

The filmmakers chose the 16th century court of the French king Francois I as the backdrop for their tale largely to work Leonardo into the story.

In historical accounts, the Italian master was the king’s intellectual and artistic sidekick, as well as a liberalizing influence on the prince, the future King Henry II.

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The film, which is in title limbo until Fox Family Films negotiates an agreement with Disney over its prior claim to the “Cinderella” name, has been shooting since mid-September in the Perigord region of southwest France. Encamping in Sarlat, where the production is revamping storefronts, town squares and the cathedral, the “untitled Cinderella project” has fanned out across several meticulously preserved chateaux and manor houses in a cost-saving attempt to re-create life during the French Renaissance.

Filming entirely on location, the production is making a virtue of necessity. With a $25-million budget, reconstructing period locales on a sound stage was not an option, Tennant explains. Instead, the production is constructing location sets at a breakneck pace, building some 72 over the course of the nine-week shoot.

After three years spent developing the script, Fox brought Tennant in as director at the insistence of Drew Barrymore, who had starred in the director’s 1993 television movie, “The Amy Fisher Story.” The Cinderella film is the director’s third feature, after “It Takes Two” and “Fools Rush In.”

The grand ball and other key scenes are being shot an hour’s drive north of Sarlat in Hautefort Castle, a stone fortress with pepper-pot towers and formal gardens perched on a promontory overlooking rolling vineyards and fields of maize.

Instead of being a case of love at first sight, the ball culminates a hard-won reconciliation between Danielle and the prince after weeks of playing cat-and-mouse with each other, of weathering a trying series of arguments, rejections, lies, affectionate teasing, drunken revels and passionate embraces.

“This is one tough Cinderella,” Barrymore explains with a grin. “She dives into bees’ hives for the wax, takes pigs out truffle-hunting, swims in the river, quotes Sir Thomas More’s ‘Utopia.’ She even nails the prince with an apple for stealing her horse. She does many things a man does, whether it involves physical strength or reading. She’s ahead of her time in breaking down the barriers between a woman’s place in society and a man’s place. The fairy tale Cinderella always gets shut down by those around her, but Danielle refuses to get shut down.”

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Life, even under a relatively enlightened king like Francois, was far from a fairy tale. Women were at the bottom of an inflexible class structure, and unfortunate ones like Cinderella were commonly sold into servitude.

On a brisk October evening, several hundred gowned and masked ball-goers mill about inside the vast courtyard under a starry sky and dazzling Klieg lights. Tennant looks nervously at a fog gathering in a nearby valley. The evening before, the ball scene with its 250 costumed extras--the most expensive setup of the entire film--was rained out. If there’s a replay this night, the production risks turning into a pumpkin--at least temporarily.

Fortunately, the weather holds out. Flames leap from a series of torches placed to let the light dance off fountains and reflecting pools of water. Under blue, red and gold banners, tables groan with bowls of apples, platters of roast suckling pig, silver tankards and gilt pitchers. To one side of the crowd, a model of Neptune’s ship the size of a parade float is pulled by silver unicorns. In a bit of inspired scenic recycling from the film’s opening sequence, designer Michael Howells used the boat as Jeanne Moreau’s bed when she greets the Brothers Grimm in the early 19th century to relate her version of the “true story” of Cinderella.

“I’m trying for a bit of whimsy,” Howells explains. “Here’s this gaudy party decoration and it shows up three centuries later as great-great-great-something granddaughter’s bed.”

Brueghel meets Mardi Gras in costume designer Jenny Beavan’s madcap marriage of antler masks, sunburst crowns and Renaissance lords and ladies with faces delicately painted to suggest raccoon, deer and pheasants. Anjelica Huston’s Rodmilla wears a horned headdress that risks poking holes through her daughter Marguerite’s equally flamboyant collar of peacock feathers each time Rodmilla inclines her head to talk with her.

All of a sudden, heralds trumpet a fanfare from the parapets and all eyes turn expectantly toward the castle gate. In beaded dress, pointed gossamer angel wings and, naturally, sparkling slippers (not glass, but studded with crystals), Danielle emerges through an arched bower of gilt oak leaves patterned after a painting by Italian Renaissance master Piero della Francesca. Parting the crowd like Moses dividing the Red Sea, the prince races toward her, then brings her forward to the throne to present this mysterious sweetheart triumphantly to the king and queen.

Furious, Rodmilla storms up, yanks off the wings and declares in a ringing denunciation that Danielle is a brazen impostor, a scullery maid pretending to nobility. Mortified, Danielle tears back through the gasping crowd and out into the night.

After five or six takes, Tennant is satisfied. “My greatest fear was that the scene would look like one of those bad Renaissance fairs with out-of-work actors,” he says with a grin. “Now I can rest easier.”

Huston is more reserved. “It felt like a school pageant,” she objects with a wan smile, “with everyone out under those very bright lights, all dressed up. That’s not to say it won’t photograph beautifully. It’s just that night shoots throw you into some sort of suspended reality to begin with and tonight seemed all the more disjointed, more pageantry than acting.”

The horned headdress certainly didn’t help, even though giving herself devil’s horns to contrast with Danielle’s angelic wings was her own idea.

“My horns kept falling off every time I plucked Cinderella’s wing off so I had to come back up to makeup for horn adjustment. Then I’m told I’m needed down on the set pronto. I get into slap and drag and they break for lunch, lunch being 1:30 a.m. It’s less than ideal.

“I like to get into a scene, warm up and cook. With the ball, I kept being taken out of the fridge and put back in again. Perhaps it’s just one of those days when you feel you have a mushroom on your head.”

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Apart from the appeal of spending a couple of months in one of the most dramatically beautiful corners of France, Huston was drawn to the role by the opportunity to lend a quirky comedic twist to the usually humorless wicked stepmother. Who could not feel empathy for the desperate poseur fallen on hard times as she archly laments: “Hell could not possibly be worse than a house in the country”?

Elsewhere, Rodmilla chastises Marguerite for giving up hope of winning the prince’s affections. “Darling,” she says, dripping world-weary sarcasm, “nothing is final until your death and even then, I’m sure God negotiates.”

“It helps her believability to give her a light edge,” Huston observes dryly.

“At the beginning of the action, the wicked stepmother isn’t so wicked,” Tennant says. “When her second husband, Danielle’s father, dies, she’s put in an awful position. Being saddled with three girls and having to manage a manor put her under a lot of pressure. It made sense that the stepdaughter would be the one who would do the chores and be reduced to servitude.

“Rodmilla’s agenda is to get her pretty daughter married to the prince, which was pretty much everybody’s agenda back then. Marry up and she solves a lot of their problems.”

This version also offers plausible grounds for the stepmother’s obdurate, generally unexplained resentment of her stepdaughter. As Danielle’s father is dying, he reaches, not for his new wife, but for his young daughter. Rodmilla storms away in a fit of implacable, enduring jealousy.

Years later, when the grown-up Danielle tearily begs to know if there were ever a moment when Rodmilla loved her, the baroness responds with accustomed venom.

“How can you love a pebble in your shoe?” she asks.

After giving the stepmother believable if not wholly justifiable motivations, Tennant and Parks turned their attentions to the prince, who is played by Dougray Scott.

“What does it mean when your dad puts a gun to your head and says, ‘In four days, you’re going to choose a bride’?” muses the director. In this script, it means that Danielle, with well-timed nudges from Leonardo, shames the shallow Henry into a bout of self-discovery that ultimately saves them both. Compared to the pretty-boy prince of the 1950 animated Disney version who doesn’t have a word of dialogue, this prince is a veritable Hamlet.

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Despite Disney staking claim to Cinderella in modern times, parents have been alternately spooking and charming children with this tale of the archetypal abusive family and class-crossing love in virtually all cultures since Pharaonic times. According to child psychologist Bruno Bettelheim in “The Uses of Enchantment,” his landmark 1976 study of fairy tales, there are nearly 500 recorded variations on the Cinderella theme, including a 9th century Chinese legend featuring a magical fish as fairy godmother.

The indisputable stroke of brilliance about the current project is the introduction of Leonardo as fairy godmother, more a blend of eccentric sage and meddling but well-meaning yenta than magician. Susannah Grant, the original screenwriter, first conjured up the Leonardo connection.

Leonardo is the ubiquitous matchmaker, steering the prince to meet Danielle, chiding the king to let Henry decide whom he should marry, and, crucially, freeing Danielle from the cellar where Rodmilla has locked her up. “Yes,” he quips, tongue firmly in cheek, “I will go down in history as the man who opened the door.”

To Leonardo’s voracious curiosity and utter inability to finish anything, British character actor Patrick Godfrey injects a zaniness to the inventor’s craziest antics, from walking on water in pontoon shoes to crashing through the countryside, trailing his prototypical kite behind him.

In one rainy scene, Leonardo explodes in anger at the prince’s cowardly stupidity at letting Danielle go. “I went over the top, flailing and gesticulating because that’s what I thought Andy meant when he asked for more body language,” Godfrey recalls. Tennant reined him in. “Stop trying to act so hard,” he suggested. “Just deal with the rain.”

“It was a wonderful note, and utterly simple,” Godfrey says.

If Leonardo is unexpectedly screwball, Danielle is a study in self-possession--and initially, a total puzzlement to Barrymore.

“At first I had no idea who this person was,” she says. “I felt so stiff, so weird. Then I thought, this is what a character of 500 years ago was like--a little stiff, a little weird. Eventually, I realized, oh, she needs a family just like I’ve always wanted a family. In my own life, it took me many years of feeling self-conscious before I could break free and be uninhibited. That’s very different for Cinderella. She’s so strong and fearless. She’s always been sure of who she is.”

It’s 4 in the morning, but there are hours still to go before the cinematic stroke of midnight rings down the evening’s ball scene. Just as spirits and peacock feather headdresses begin to droop, Tennant has a brainstorm. With an alarming crash, Aretha Franklin blares forth on the sound system and the extras start dancing, listlessly at first, then with more gusto as the director takes Marguerite’s hand and cuts his own boogie night. Five centuries after Danielle, Aretha pleads for what all Cinderellas want as R-E-S-P-E-C-T booms into the Perigord fog.

“We are supposed to live happily ever after,” Prince Henry reminds his new bride at the end of the film.

“Says who?” fires back Danielle, the 1990s reality-checking Cinderella with the gleam of equality and not mere stars in her eyes.